The author looks at recent nuclear 'near-misses' and urges more attention to be paid by the public and presidential candidates to the risk of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war. As a solution, he looks at the proposals for "dealerting" put forward by Dr. Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute.
Japanese lawmakers voted Friday to allow the military use of space, breaking a decades-old taboo in the officially pacifist country which has an increasingly ambitious space programme. The move will remove any legal obstacles to building more advanced spy satellites.
Players of a new online game called Foldit will help design three-dimensional protein structures for HIV vaccines, and enzymes for repairing DNA in diseased tissues. David Baker, a leading protein scientist at the University of Washington, teamed up with computer scientists to create the game.
The world's climate modellers are drawing up plans for a global supercomputing center with computing power of 100 petaflops that would provide detailed local forecasts of future climate change, with the intent of generating useful forecasts of water supply, droughts, health, and future food supply.
DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has released a request for proposals to develop a National Cyber Range, part of a $30 billion, government-wide effort to prepare for online battle.
US academics and researchers have worked out how to make energy savings of around 50%, by delaying data flowing into a network by just a few milliseconds.
Chinese satellite navigation officials say they intend to field an operational system covering all of Asia by 2010, but they are giving few details on the deployment plans for their global system. In addition China has yet to complete frequency coordination with the United States, Europe, Russia and others.
"Flammable ice" or methane hydrates, could be the world's last great source of carbon-based fuel - assuming the methane can be mined from the crystal lattices of ice that trap it beneath ocean beds and permafrost.
Earthquake researchers in California hope to take advantage of the motion sensors in laptops to create an earthquake-sensing network. By putting computers in homes and businesses to work as seismic monitors, the researchers hope to pull together a wealth of information on major quakes, and perhaps even offer early warnings, giving a few seconds' notice of a potentially devastating quake.
A team at the University of Washington wants to marshal swarms of good computers to neutralize the bad ones. They say their plan would be cheap to implement and could cope with botnets of any size.